The Tale of the Wanderer
by arhand
Summary: first attempt at writing, may contain many crossovers eventually. Some aspects inspired by works of C.S. Louis, Terry Pratchett, and other authors no main yet. please r&r.


This is my first attempt at writing. This idea has bouncing around in my head for a while and I would greatly appreciate any thoughts and ideas concerning it.

Disclaimer: work of fiction, blah, blah, blah. Any resemblances to actual people/events that appear herein are almost purely coincidental.

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This is a story. I choose not to tell you whether or not it is an intentional fabrication of my imagination, a record of my delusional outlook on the world or my true experiences. I will leave you to draw your own conclusions. Suffice it to say it is a story, one which I intend to be told. Let us begin.

My name is Michael and, as far as the rest of world is concerned, I do not exist. I am one of the millions of people that are merely faces in the crowd. You see thousands of us every day but never even consciously realize it. We are thought in the same way one thinks or a tree or a park bench, something that basically is, and is often in the way. The only major difference to most outlooks is that we move, so are consistently in the way. Think for a moment on how many humans you walk by each day in your life, and how many you actually think of as people. We are given other labels so we can be easily ignored; coworkers, commuters, classmates. You can spend nearly everyday of your life in our presence and never acknowledge us enough to the point that you would notice if we were to disappear. We are not special. We are not smart, we are not diligent, we are not stupid, we are not lazy, we do not stand out, we only exist.

This story is about this outlook that has spread across the world, and its consequences. The condition of blending in I described progressed throughout my life. It reached the point where my world closed in around me more and more each day. One day it reached the point where I was certain that if I vanished no one would be the wiser. This was an ironic thought. For that night I had a dream.

I dreamed that my perception was a film of water on a glass sphere. As I lost personal connections they gathered closer and closer to single point, collecting together like a drop of dew. Until finally it closed around over my head and I fell off of the glass globe of earth in a raindrop of my own apathy into a colorless void. I could never describe this place I fell through. It was not white or black or similar in any way to anything I saw whilst still awake. I fell through this void without direction, passing many other crystalline spheres each unique in the patterns and lines visible beneath there surface, but indistinguishable from each other to my untrained senses. I drifted in this place of unimaginable vastness for a time of uncertain length. Until one of the globes I passed suddenly alit with a pale violet light and my own drop swerved toward it without warning. As usually happens in dreams of this nature I awoke just before I impacted against its surface. Nothing could have prepared me for what my eyes would see upon awakening.

I was no longer in my home of many years; I was outside in a field of some kind. Soft, short grass was beneath my back, I could see trees in the distance through my half opened eyes. As I slowly became more aware I suddenly jerked to full attention as one fact became clear. I was no longer on the world of my birth either.

The soft grass beneath me was a pale scarlet in color, as were the leaves on the trees in the distance. The sky was as pale as I remember from my few moment watching clouds as a child, but it was not the color I remembered it, I was certain the sky was not to be teal or any other of the colors that reside between green and blue that I never learned the names of. The only things I recognized as correct were the fluffy white clouds that drifted slowly across the sun. As I slowly stood and looked around, futilely hoping that it would suddenly change back to the way it was supposed to be, two thoughts echoed repeatedly in my dazed mind: _'Where am I?', ' What do I do now?'_

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Please review.


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